


The Lock of Fortuna

by pinstripedJackalope



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Aradia may or may not be a goddess of luck, Belly Dancing, Blind Sollux Captor, Eye Trauma, Gen, Humanstuck, Sickfic, Sollux is a creepy fuck and kind of foretells shit, Vomiting, adding tags as you go is a strange thing, also I'm gonna go ahead and call this a sickfic, and one heartfelt circular hug to pass around, because we're dealing with luck, hey look I put up a picture, terrible Chinese food, which means a minimum of two viruses and an eyeball stabbing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-04
Updated: 2014-08-13
Packaged: 2018-02-11 16:17:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 16,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2074755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinstripedJackalope/pseuds/pinstripedJackalope
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You are unaware that things are very close to going to hell in a frilly pink handbasket, courtesy of Lady Probability.<br/>You really shouldn't be, considering that violence is a bitch all three of you are familiar with.<br/>Humanstuck--when the defecated offal hits the whirling blades of the cooling device.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. You Totally Accidentally Check Out Your Best Friend

**Author's Note:**

> Always feel free to shoot me comments or to point out spelling/grammar things because damn, that's embarrassing.

You get home on the day that everything goes to shit with a headache, a sore throat, and a smear of black lipstick on the front of your recently washed white shirt.  Walking through the front door, you get an earful of Eridan whining from the direction of the bathroom.  You would try to outshout him but your throat isn’t pleased with you, so you decide to do the next best thing--chuck something close at hand and hope it takes out a chunk of the pretentious purple streak that he wasted an entire Saturday of your life on when he dragged you to the salon with him.  You come further into the living room aiming one of your notebooks, trying to get the right angle to throw it at him, when you trip right over Sollux, who is sprawled on the ground playing his 3DS with half-lidded eyes.  You drop the notebook on his head instead, out of spite, not bothering to ask if he’s taken his meds--if he hadn’t, he’d be holed up in his room avoiding you altogether.  He hardly glances up, but he does make a small noise in your direction and deadpan in a scratchy voice, “Tea.”

You don’t really know what you see in Sollux Captor.  It’s a question you've been struggling with since the second grade, when the chinese girl who dressed like a cat and drew impressively muscled horses for her hulk of a friend asked how you could stand hanging around such a grumpy puss all the time.  You, as per your reputation for serious contemplation, had sat down in a corner all recess, pondering.  The completely, heartbreakingly honest answer you came up with way back then is that you don’t know, never have, and you don’t really give a shit.  Sollux is just Sollux--patently genius yet socially backwards, a specimen of bad luck known as the universal dumping ground, who succinctly sums up everything that is wrong with the human race.  His only real talents are coding, hacking, and pissing people off doing one or the other.  His left eye is milked over with a cataract, meaning that he’s half blind, and has been since before you met him.  Once a month he comes down with a migraine that completely floors him, and all you’ll hear for hours are groans of pain burgeoning from his black hole of a room because he forgot to turn off the blinking lights on his computers.  He aced his SATs, and then proceeded to botch the essay portion of the common app.  He eats fries and nuggets all smashed together with ranch dressing.  And on top of it all, he makes fun of Eridan’s stutter, all while lisping like a waterlogged dolphin-bot.

You hate Sollux Captor with something akin to passion.  So of course he’s your best friend.  So much so that at the beginning of your first semester junior year, you sucked up your trepidation and split the lease of a super shitty apartment that was the size of your parent’s linen closet.  And, as you really should have guessed would happen, Eridan followed a few weeks later mumbling about his parents’ ridiculous rules and asking if he could sleep in the dime-sized living room.  Que sera sera, whoop-di-fucking-do, your life with two ass-clowns began.  They may annoy the ever living shit out of you, but it isn’t bad.  You and Sollux snip back and forth like it’s going out of style, then Eridan will get in the middle and convince you to let him rent a new romcom and you’ll spend the next two hours crying into your elbow as Sollux laughs over his laptop keyboard and Eridan scowls at him.  You always have to do the shopping, and you won’t hear the end of it unless you get the twelve packs of monster and those little stuffed crepe things that cost a fortune.  Every time you have to stand in line, waiting to get your cigarettes, you snort a sigh through your nose and wonder what the fuck you would even do without those assholes.

Not that it’s always easy, oh HELL no.  Violence is a bitch that all three of you are acquainted with.  While you suffer in silence and suffice to rid yourself of extra steam by throwing some cutlery at your mattress or playing fifty two pickup with the vacuum cleaner, Sollux and Eridan are both of the type who will get their fists jammed up somebody’s nose.  Actually, amend that--Sollux doesn’t normally give a shit about fighting or not fighting.  You have to hit him pretty hard first for him to get started, but once he’s there he blows up like Michael Bay got a hold of a potato gun and started firing Molotov cocktails.  Something’ll set Eridan off and he throws the first punch, and then BAM you have two gangly fucks in a knot on the kitchen floor, trying to pull each other’s teeth out, and forget about trying to mediate.

That’s how you always knew that eventually some defecated offal would hit the whirling blades of the cooling device.  The gleefully prodding goddess of probability just could not pass up the chance to fuck everything up real good after watching those two assholes going at it like someone put them in a ring and handed them each a pool noodle.

“Like I even would,” you snarl at Sollux’s tea comment, snatching your notebook so that you can make a beeline for your room and be done with dealing with both of them.  You are so not in the mood to play fetch-it with the loser currently lying on the carpet.  You are sick, tired, and so far from in the mood that if the mood is a planet, you are anti-matter.  In fact, you are the higgs-boson.  You are a god particle that has no right to actually exist.  God, you’re tired.

“Not me, you fuck,” Sollux says, holding you up short.  He doesn’t even look at you.  “You’ve got that whole thick vibe going, and fuck if I’m going to hang around if you’re coughing on me.  I’ve got enough problemth.”

“Yeah, you uncultured fuckin’ plebe, you hav-ve me as a problem!” Eridan shouts from down the short hallway, and keeps nattering on about how his hair products got messed up.  Sollux doesn’t even give that one a twitch.  He’s obviously been listening to Eridan for long enough now that it isn’t even tickling his sadistic sense of humor.  

You groan to yourself.  If you weren’t feeling like shit you would grab both of them by the napes of their necks and give them a good screaming lecture right in the ear canals, but at the moment that feels like altogether too much work.  You decide to take Sollux’s suggestion and cross the room, taking care to knock his stylus out of his hand as you go.  You’ve given up trying to figure out how he knows you’re sick before you tell him.  It’s just one of those Sollux things.  An annoying thing, because usually he only uses it to whine and gloat, but a universal constant all the same.  “You are an omnipotent waste of space,” you fling back on your way, poking around in the fridge.

“KK,” he says, his voice loaded with something akin to distracted irritation, “it’th omnithshent.  Moron.”

“Yeah, I know, I just wanted to hear you try to say it.  The only thing that makes me feel better when I’m down is listening to you attempting to sound like a sentient being.”

“Rude,” he mumbles into the game, but he’s already losing interest in you.  The sounds of a Pokemon battle drift after you.  You grunt, too tired to put up much of a fight.  You like to think that living with one of the biggest assholes on the planet, second only to your lovely ass, has given you some perspective on when to not push things.  

You have a sneaking suspicion that in reality you’ve just grown used to one another like an old married couple.  You sigh a little to yourself.  “Yo, princess of the dead over there, want anything while I’m in here?” you demand, fishing for the iced tea that gets pushed right to the back of the shelves.  There’s some reply that you can hardly hear which you elect to ignore in favor of pressing the bottle to your forehead.  It feels nice against the recent wounds of your completely shit day.  

You have a lot of shit days.  It would be more accurate to say that you have a shit life, but let’s face it, you don’t generally expect to wake up from an actually decent dream only to realize that you’ve slept through your alarm and your tonsils are swelling.  And then you don’t usually expect things to get worse when you walk into the wrong room and nearly faceplant into an actual dead body being dissected for the med students.  Also up there in nope-not-what-I-need-out-of-today-ville is tripping, falling, and accidentally taking Rose Lalonde down with you as you run for the bathroom to puke up your insides.  You thought you owned the market in wrath.  Oh, were you wrong.

“Hey dickweed, what giveth?”

You jump a little before you turn your glare at Sollux.  He’s materialized next to you, his shoulders hunched.  Up close he looks like he hasn’t slept in a day or two.  “What do you want?” you grumble, giving him a solid punch on the shoulder.  

He shrugs it off.  “The coke you promithed me, you ornery kitten.  Or didn’t I thpeak clearly enough for your thenthitive earth?”

“No, you fucking didn’t.  Stop wasting air that people who actually enunciate could be using.”  You lift your lip in a snarl when he just ignores the insult, parking his ass on the counter beside you.  He doesn’t seem inclined to fetch the coke himself.

“I knocked over thome of ED’th fanthy bottleth in the bathroom,” he says instead, introspective.  His focus is far away from the land of the living.  You think that if you snapped in front of his face right now he’d just start drooling.  “If he trieth to murder me, that’th why.”

“What are you, stupid?” you ask.  You trust that whatever’s going on in Sollux-ville right now you can get through it with your favorite linguistic attack--the battering ram.  It's worked for you so far.  You fear the day that you can't bully him into sanity.  “Fucking lord, taking care of the two of you is such a drain on my self-restraint.  Why would you even go near his shit in the bathroom?”

He shrugs, shaking himself out of the almost-trance.  “Thingth were happening.  It wath totally unintentional.”

You take a deep breath to begin ranting, hoping that getting a good tirade out of your system will make you feel better.  His milky white eye watches you in silence, angled in just that way where you can't see the other one.  He picked up the habit way back in middle school to creep out Cronus and his gang, and you’ll admit that the dead eye has a way of nailing a guy.  You’re mostly used to it at this point, though, because this is the nerd that throws a bitch fit if you don’t order him buffalo chicken pizza at Dion’s.  The white eye is the opposite of his other one, which is a vibrant green-brown and a reminder that he could have been handsome if not for the cloudy eye and his desperate need for braces.  You sometimes envied him the sharp angle of his jaw and his effortless hair.  

You spent a long time fighting with your self-esteem over your pigmented skin.  Who’s bright idea was it to give a black kid a huge mouth and the infinite delights of a temper the length of a matchstick?  Not yours, because being you is similar to trying to french a black hole.  When you were a kid you would have killed to be Sollux.  He was a little weird, a little unstable in his teen years, but people liked him.  Not that life was perfectly peachy for a half-blood native who grew up poorer than dirt, but at least Sollux was attractive.

With that thought you snap out of the dark place in your mind and realize that you totally just opened your mouth and forgot to say anything.  Sollux is sniggering in your face, the sleepless pouches under his eyes pinched as he smirks in your direction.  He can probably read your mind, the asshole, and you scowl as hard as you can.  Jesus, how did you even get there?  What train of thought considered that an appropriate destination, ugh, what is wrong with you?  That is how you realize that you should not be conscious.  Time to sleep off this damn cold and forget Lalonde’s tentacle eyes.

“Stuff it up your anus, Captor,” you say, and leave the kitchen.

You are unaware that things are very close to going to hell in a frilly pink handbasket, courtesy of Lady Probability.


	2. You Wake Up And You Really Do Not Want To Check Out Your Best Friend

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things get nasty.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING: mind the tags. MIND the TAGS for gods sake!

The first time you speak to Sollux after he gets fully, irrevocably blinded is a fucking mess.  Mostly because you spend half the conversation yelling over him and generally making a fool of yourself.  Which is, admittedly, mostly because you don’t realize that he’s sitting on the floor two doors down your yardstick of a hallway in a puddle of his own blood.  God, past you can be an insensitive ass.  You are the worst, a veritable geyser of pus that somehow coagulates into words that are absolute trash.  It is you.  God, you are atrocious.

The first thing you hear is, “You fucking fuck!  You stabbed me in the eye!”  You don’t think much of it, because it comes out of the mouth of a snowman who is leisurely lounging around in a very crowded pool, which is at your school.  Your school does not own a pool.  You don’t think much of that, either, because this is dream logic and you couldn’t give less of a shit.  You kind of shift a little, and sink back down into your dream.  Where were you?  Oh, right.  You were looking for clothes.  Because this is an anxiety dream, and you can’t get enough of those.

The next thing you hear is a wordless wail, and you start to surface from dreamland at that one.  You blink at your ceiling a little, your throat gummed closed.  You sniffle a little and figure out that fuck, your head must be holding terrifying amounts of snot if it’s making that noise.  Why are you awake…?

Oh, right.  The jerkwads down the hall who can’t give proper due to a man who might be dying.  You prop yourself up enough to snag your phone from the floor, punch in your second speed-dial (because the first is your parents, and how fucking great is it that you had that golden opportunity to play into Captor’s duality fetish--not), and angrily wait for him to pick up because fuck if you are going to haul your frumpy cold-ridden ass all the way to the kitchen.

You are greeted by a barrage of profanity, courtesy of Eridan.  You don’t know what in the flipping fuck he’s doing, but your door must actually be doing it’s job of soundproofing the greater apartment because on the phone he is LOUD.  “KK thith better be you,” Sollux says, quiet in comparison, and you are too fuzzy to notice that his voice is shaking.

“Of course it’s fucking me, you dim-witted fucking ballsack.  What the fuck is the matter with you two?  What the fucking hell is all the fucking shouting about?”  You retroactively snarl at yourself for managing five variations of fuck in the first words you utter, but then you remember that you are sick and trying to sleep.

He sucks in a deep breath, and lets it out slowly into the mic.  “We got in a fight and--”

“Oh, hark!  I thought it might be a fire!  Because that would be the only logical reason to wake me up in the middle of a nap.  What the fuck is wrong with you, Sollux?  Aside from everything that is ALREADY MONUMENTALLY WRONG WITH YOU?”

“KK-”

You don’t wait for him to get a word in edgewise.  “Oh no, wait, I’ve got it figured out.  The current problem is obviously that you can’t figure out how to SHUT YOUR FUCKING MOUTH BEFORE YOU GET SLAPPED IN THE FACE.  AM I RIGHT, YOU SPECK OF UNWASHED CUNT CHEESE?”  You are good and angry now, so you don’t slow down as you continue shouting in his ear, coming up with progressively less logical insults.  You are so incensed that you hardly leave room to breathe, and you don’t register that you’re slipping into that particular hole.  Sollux is the one person who can actually knock you out of your rants when they get to that because he has the uncanny ability to shout right back until you realize what a douche-canoe you are.  When one of your fights escalates, usually he fights back.  You are so used to it that you don’t even notice that he’s stopped talking altogether.

At least until you finish with an eloquent, “--ABOUT YOU, YOU USELESS FETID LUMP OF STAGNANT MILK CURDS?  YOU’VE GOT A RATHER FUCKING FUNCTIONAL EYEBALL THAT IS JUST SITTING IN YOUR HEAD, WHY THE FUCK DO YOU NEVER USE IT?” and have to pause for air.  Eridan is still wailing in the background, some strange amalgamation of curses and apologies, and you frown even deeper as you listen.  Sollux isn’t saying anything at all, and finally you just ask, “Well?”

At that you get a breathy chuckle, and that is strange enough that it pushes you off the tracks sideways.  Your eyes close as you focus on his end, regret beginning to flood your lungs.  God, what did you do?  Is he actually dying?  Did you just diss your best friend on his way to meet the angel of death?  Jesus christ _why is he so quiet_?

It takes him a while to say something, and by then you are hauling your sick ass upright in bed.  You are about to flat out panic when his lispy voice stutters across the line.  “Yeah, that eyeball thing ith... not happening,” he says, and pauses again.  “Could you jutht… do me a favor and come thmack ED in the fathe?”

“Why can’t you do it?” you ask, but this time you are actively working to not sound like an accusatory asshole.

You are waiting for some revelatory shit as the seconds tick by, but all you get after almost a minute of silence is, “I… fuck, I need help.”  And with that, he either drops the phone or gets hit in the face with something.  You are treated to a few seconds of staticky clattering before the call ends.

That… really does not sound good.  You decide that now is the time to undertake some legitimate ass hauling, and you manage to fall flat on your face for the second time today as you scramble for your door.  One deep breath later and you’re on your feet again, hitting the door to your room with your entire body.  You curse and tear at the carpeting that’s coming loose around the handle--fuck the guy who lived here before you, who even decides that trying to soundproof a door with shitty carpeting is a good idea?!--and once you finally get the door open you begin to hear Eridan in person.  He is, by all accounts, flipping his fucking shit right over the edge of a cliff.  You charge the hallway and slide into the kitchen, expecting a wall of blood.

It’s… yeah, it’s not quite that bad, but there is plenty of evidence of things that should be inside of people.  Your stomach turns upside-down for a moment.  Eridan is pacing around haphazardly, his hands hovering but not quite touching his face, red up to his third knuckles.  Tears stream past his still cursing mouth, and he doesn’t see you as you hesitantly sidle around a chair that is lying on its side in the middle of the tile floor.  Sollux is sitting curled up against the cabinet under the sink, his elbows on his knees and his right hand pressed to his face.  You can’t see much through his fringe of bangs except that his entire arm is sticky with blood and still more is running down his wrist.  You aim your words at Eridan even as you focus on Sollux, growling, “What.  The fuck.  Did you do?”

The response is instantaneous and nigh on disastrous.  Eridan whips around and nearly mows you over as he attaches himself to your front, unsteady on his feet.  He babbles into your face, a stuttering littany of, “Fuck--shit fuck--shit shit shit _shit_ \--fuck I’m so sorry--shit w-what do I do?”  He then gets hysterical all over your shoulder, but you can’t give him the smack on the face he deserves because at the same time Sollux raises his head and you freeze solid right where you’re standing.

You don’t even comprehend it at first--that is how crazy what you’re seeing is.  His hand is soaked in blood, yes.  It’s pressed over his right eye, yes.  He’s got so much blood streaming down his face that it looks like he started bawling scarlet, double yes.  But what stabs nausea through your guts is that from between his fingers protrudes something that should definitely not be there.  This something is long, thin, and made of wood.  The end is splintered like someone took it and cracked it in half.  That, you manage to think to yourself, is half of a chopstick.  Someone poked half a chopstick through his eye.  He has an actual sliver of wood jammed into the soft jelly of the sensory organ sitting in his ocular socket.  Wow, you think, after you come to that astonishing conclusion.  Wow, woozy.  You think vaguely that you are going to pass out cold.

You grab onto Eridan as you wrench your eyes-- _FUCK!_ \--off of Sollux.  You clear your throat a little, trying to keep yourself present.  “Sollux?” you try, hoping that he can understand you even though the room is spinning.

“Right here,” he says, as nonchalant as he can even though he’s shaking, and it finally really hits you that he’s hurt.  You were blundering about yelling at him and he was sitting here bleeding all over the floor.  He has a hand over his good eye--don’t you dare think about that chopstick, oh fuck--and he’s already blind in the other eye and you were shouting at him and he can’t _see you_.

“Oh, god,” you say, a response indicative of your masterful grasp of the english language, and he spares a moment to kind of snigger at you in the same breathy, gasping manner that he did on the phone.  Which reminds you--Eridan.

“Kar w-what do I--w-what do I ev-ven do--fuck I didn’t mean--and he blacked out--he w-wasn’t even respondin’ to me--w-what can I--how-w do I FIX IT?”

You’ve been tuning him out for a good half a minute now, and his gibbering has increased in pitch to the point where he’s hardly audible.  “Eridan--”

“He w-was bleedin’ all ov-ver the floor and he w-wasn’t respondin’ to me--”

“Eridan, you fuck, listen to me--”  You try shaking him a little to cut through the continuous wailing, but to no avail.

“W-what if I killed him, Kar, w-what if he’s dyin' right now-w--I don’t think I could handle actually killin’ somebody-”

“SQUEEZE THE OVERPRICED HAIR PRODUCTS OUT OF YOUR EARS AND CALL A FUCKING AMBULANCE IS WHAT YOU DO.”

Finally he seems to register your words.  “Oh,” he says, and he’s gasping like a fish out of water.  “Oh, fuck, let me…”  He begins fumbling for his phone, and you push him into one of the upright chairs before you kneel down in front of Sollux.

The wound looks even worse up close, and you can’t even see the actual wound part yet.  “Fucking christ,” you breathe, grabbing his shoulder to both steady yourself and anchor him, which is something you’re pretty sure you learned from Lalonde, but you’re fingers are still kind of tingling like you’ll keel over any second so you’re taking that one with a grain of salt.  “Fuck, how deep is that thing?”

“Dunno,” Sollux says, and then he fucking _moves his hand_ like you will go poking around at it and tell him.  You nearly jump backwards out of your skin, but you’re saved from that tragedy by the fact that you can’t feel your extremities.  The wound--which you can now clearly see, thank you SO MUCH for that one, Captor--is nastier than even your imagination provided.  His eyelid, which you can hardly think about without expulsing your stomach contents all over him, was closed when the chop-stick went through.  From under his closed lid seeps not only blood, but some thick, clear substance.  He is literally weeping his fucking eye juice, which is a thought that you could have spared yourself from ever thinking, but now you can’t get it out of your fucking head.  Everything is tacky with blood--his eyelashes are sticking to his cheek in clumps, and you can practically hear his lips unsticking as he grins hazily at you.  “‘th it bad?” he asks.

“I am going to vomit on you,” you say, and he slides his fingers back around the chop-stick as if to keep it from moving.  “Are you… what, are you feeling okay?  Doesn’t it hurt?  Are you in shock but not telling me because you think you’re fine?  Because seriously, you are taking this really fucking well.”

“I think I got a shot of adrenaline,” he admits, but even you can see that he’s shaking harder.  

“Fuck!” Eridan shouts behind you, and you jump.  “Kar--I can’t do it, I’m not hittin' the right buttons, I--fuck, I can’t ev-ven dial three numbers, oh fuck--”

Before you can stop him, Sollux squirms around you, moving like he isn’t quite sure where anything is.  He almost slaps Eridan in the face before he snatches his iphone with his clean hand.  “I’m blind and I’ll thtill dial 911 fathter than thith moron,” he snaps, feeling around the edge for the lock button, but you grab the phone away just as fast as a mother taking something dangerous out of her toddler's hands.  

“Both of you shut your fucking mouths until it’s necessary for you to speak!” you say, glaring down Eridan and tightening your grip on Sollux.  Neither of these guys are thinking straight, obviously.  That’s not new--you are leader in everything but name around here, and right now you need to take lead.  You swiftly dial the phone and toss it back at Eridan, mostly to give him something useful to do other than freaking out all over you.  “Okay, Eri.  You got this?”

He nods at you in silence, holding the phone to his ear.  Sollux also shuts his mouth, which is a little more worrisome because while Eridan will get pissy and give you the silent treatment for days at a time, Sollux can’t stop snarking to save his life.  You rub his back a little, your mind almost blank as you wait for Eridan to get the basics across, until he shudders under your arm and says, “I feel like I’m gonna be thick.”

At that Eridan looks at you with unadulterated terror in his eyes, and you swiftly motion for him to back off before you feel around on the counter behind you for your perpetually-empty fruit bowl.  You dump out the random assortment of coins in the bottom before you gently shove it into Sollux’s free hand.  “You gonna be okay if I go get Eri a glass of water or something?” you ask, and he bobs his head a little, his hand all but glued in place.  “I’m still right here, okay?”  He nods again, his face paler than it gets after a three day bender with no sunlight.  You would feel bad abandoning him if Eridan hadn’t started crying again in the background, tears streaming down his cheeks.

“I fucked up,” Eridan says, looking up at you with big glassy eyes as you try to hand him some water.  He still looks abjectly terrified, the skin around his eyes puffed up and irritated.

“Yeah, you fucking did,” you say.

Your brain takes that moment to remind you that you are basically a snot volcano right now by visiting you with the most violent sneeze you have ever undertaken.  Sollux makes a vague sort of gagging noise from the floor, and you kneel, torn, between the two of them, your nose dripping down your chin in a disgusting display, wondering where the fuck you went wrong.  It takes the ambulance for-fucking-ever to get there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cheers!


	3. You Find New And Ever More Creative Ways To Regret Your Existence

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here lies the beginnings of an emotional rift, a lot of overcrowding, and a Karkat-special realization about the truth of having a blind guy in your house.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey wow, something I did hit three chapters.

You spend most of the night in the emergency room, sitting beside Sollux on a cot in one of the hallways because the hospital is all but bursting it’s seams all over the sidewalk.  It’s one of the drags of living in the city--you’ve got eight million people on top of each other and it takes the guy with penetrating trauma to the eyeball six fucking hours to get triaged and looked at by actual medical personnel.  He stops throwing up once they get an IV in him, thank fuck, but you are still nervous that he’s going to pass out on you.  The doctor tells you that he lost about a pint of blood--about as much as you donate when you can convince yourself that you aren’t going to die if you see a needle--and that he’ll be a little out of it for a while, but they don’t have time to tell you much else aside from the fact that it looks like he’s headed for surgery as soon as they have hands to spare.  An intern who looks like she’s about to piss her britches sticks a plastic cup over his eye to protect it and wraps a temporary bandage over everything, making him look like a half-boiled mutant alien, which you say aloud to him because you find it funny.  He aims carefully and punches you in the arm.

You spend the rest of the wait time peering blearily at a truly horrendous number of insurance forms.  You read them aloud to Sollux, hoping to get answers to all sorts of random questions that have no logical connection to the situation whatsoever, but he starts to answer mockingly in hex and you give up before you lose your temper and smack him in the face.  You have to tell the intern in charge of his files three times that yes, he takes 2000 milligrams of Lithium daily because yes, he’s diagnosed with treatment resistant bipolar disorder with psychotic features and rapid cycling, before she seems convinced.  He scoffs at the whole conversation, which you only notice because he’s literally using you as his facial support, his left cheek pressed into your shoulder.  You recognize that scoff as his I’m-pissed-at-reality-so-I’m-pretending-it-doesn’t-matter scoff, which you’ve heard too many times to count.  You start stroking his thick hair, and you almost get a tired sigh in return.  He doesn’t say much but you can feel his exhaustion.

By the time he gets wheeled off into an exam room to prepare for surgery you’re wrung dry, a limp noodle of a person, ready to fucking dunk your head in a bucket of the sandman’s miracle mix.  You trip over your own feet and wander into the waiting room to find Eridan sitting in a corner, his head in his hands.  You weren’t paying much attention to him when you got here, but he was so overly-emotional that you think one of the nurses slipped him something.  He’s since regained common sense, and separated himself from Sollux and you some time ago.  You sit next to him and punch him in the arm to get him to look at you, and ask in no uncertain terms for the entire, unabridged story.  "And don't be a little drama queen about it, either," you add.

He laughs shakily, running his hands through his hair.  “I got fuckin’ pissed, Kar, what do you want me to say?  He was bein’ a little shit, messin’ with my stuff, and I… fuck, I grabbed the closest fuckin’ utensil and slammed his face into the table.  Oh fuck, I’m a shitty person, aren’t I, Kar?”

You stare at Eridan in complete disbelief because SERIOUSLY, how is fucking up the bottles in the bathroom adequate reason to stab someone through the eye with a broken chopstick?  You are about to open your mouth and tell him exactly how shitty of a person he is when you remember your own phone call with Sollux, and you face-palm over the memory.  It kind of hurts now that you have time to think about it, a sickly pulsing in your stomach area.  You huff, willing your eyes not to start filling up.  God, right, if he’s a shitty person then you are a blundering fool.  

“I mean, who does that to a person, right?” Eridan says, oblivious to your turmoil.  “Fuck, I’m fucking dirt.”  He sighs into his palms, rubbing at his eyes, which are huge in his face and looking at you like he’s searching for something.  It’s the look of someone waiting to be comforted.

You seethe a little in your seat.  “You fucking stabbed a guy in the eye with a chopstick, Eridan.  Do you really think that’s means for me to protest how not shitty of a person you are?  Stop fishing for compassion, I’m fresh out.”

“I guess I kind of figured that.”  He sighs again, turning so you can only catch his profile.  “It’s just… man, I feel like so much fuckin’ cow dung about this whole thing.  What possessed me to want to hurt him like that?  And what else can I do, now that I’ve done this?  Could I kill a man?  Jee-sus, the possibilities are endless now.  I’m already seeing the precipice of morality, Kar.  This is an epic, black-hearted development in the arc of my character--”

“JUST SHUT UP, YOU STUPID FUCKING ASSHOLE!” you shout, and then have to take a deep breath to steady yourself.  You could really use a glass of water or something--your throat is throbbing like it's planning a mutiny, and your sinuses are little tunnels of misery in your face.

He jumps in his seat and looks at you sideways, and underneath his infallible ego you can see the fear that cuts through his heart.  The fear that he fucked up too badly, that he’s done something irreparable, that you are going to push him away.  “Jeez, sorry Kar.  If I’d have known you were gonna get mad at me for speakin’ my mind I wouldn’t a said anythin’!”

“Just… fuck, you are a shitty person,” you growl, turning all the way toward him.  “Listen here, you indecent, socially illiterate scumbag--”

“‘Scuze me, Kar, don’t sugar coat it--”

“Oh, shut your fucking trap.  We’re all a bunch of shitty assholes, so don’t flatter yourself that I’m targeting you.  Okay?  Just fucking listen to me.  I’m a shitty person because I choose to yell at the people I care about most in their worst times of need.  He’s a shitty person because he pushes all kinds of buttons that he shouldn’t and he never knows when to stop.  You’re the fucking showman of shitty, the guy who goes on metaphysical fucking rants about your morality while the guy you shanked in the eye still has a fucking wood splinter sticking out of his optic nerve--jesus christ, if we got any worse in the shitty human being department we would have to mark our racial identities as ‘feces’ when we filled out our fucking taxes.  The point is--something was bound to happen.  And I hope you feel like fucking curdled milk because you were the one who snapped, and for no good reason, but this was always inevitable.  Honestly, I always thought he was the one who would fall off the deep end.”  You rub angrily at your face, sighing deeply.  Now that you’re thinking about it, there has to be some sort of deep, Strideran irony in the fact that Sollux is the one that got shived in the eye, but it’s escaping you right now.  You go to say so and yawn instead, your jaw cracking.  Fuck but you wish you had never had to wake up.  You sniffle a little into your sleeve, waiting for life to take the opportunity to throw something else at you.

All you get is an, “Oh, FUCK!” from Eridan, loudly and right in your ear, as if he didn’t just hear that truly spectacular speech you just rambled out.  “You’re sick, ain’t you?  Nuts, I forgot that you weren’t feelin’ good.”

You shrug in half-hearted irritation.  “Yeah, and your point is what?”

“Point bein’ that it’s three in the mornin’, Kar.  You gotta get some sleep.”

“And what about you?” you demand.  “You’ve been awake even longer than I have, you festering moron.”

He shrugs, scrubbing his face clean.  His shirt bunches at the shoulders as he stretches, and you notice a few specks of blood on his sleeve.  He rolls out his back before hunching back down on himself and admitting, “I feel like fuckin’ shit about this, I don’t think I’m gonna be sleepin’ anytime soon.”

You stare in disbelief at him, consider paraphrasing your speech because seriously, maybe he could get shit through his fucking skull if you used smaller words, but eventually decide that the best course of action is to give up all hope and just leave him be with his own melodrama.  Sollux is going to beat him up about it eventually, might as well let him do it himself until Sollux gets around to it.  You let out an exhale of pent up air and move to put your head on his very solid, very muscled shoulder, where you relax and close your eyes.  He wraps his arm around you and hugs you for a moment, just a quick squeeze.  You don't know what to do with that.  You can’t tell if it’s supposed to be reassurance for him or for you, but you accidentally fall asleep before you can ask.

You wake up for the second time with a wad of tissues being pressed over your face and sunlight streaming onto your jacket and lighting you on fire.  You flail a bit and elbow a hard shape in what you assume are the ribs, because it grunts and goes, “Stop squirmin’, you’re leakin’ all over me and that’s just plain disgustin’.”

“Eridan, get your paws off of me right now or I’m going to shove your hand in a garbage disposal,” you say, and you wince at how whiny your voice sounds when you’re sick.  You snatch the tissues and hastily blow your nose, unhappily wiping at your face before you turn to him.  He looks like the raging excrement of a skunk living off of Mexican food.  You prod at his pale face, still mostly asleep, and demand in an awed voice, “Dude, what the fuck is up with you?  You really didn’t sleep at all?”

He only shrugs.  “The doctors came around ‘bout seven to say that he’s through surgery.  They uh… had to opt for removin’ the eye because there wasn’t enough to save.  He’s supposed to be wakin’ up right about now, so if you want to go…”

You’re on your feet before your brain has much of a say about what your body is doing, and you’re halfway to the secretary’s desk before you realize Eridan isn’t following.  “What are you, a lump on a log?” you holler back, turning around to glare at him.  You get a few disgruntled glares from other people waiting, and a white woman actually has the gall to turn her lip up at you, but you find that on the list of things you give a shit about, a hoity-toity prejudiced lady in a waiting room is pretty far down.

Eridan looks at you with huge eyes.  “You don’t honestly think he wants to see me, do you?” he asks.

You nearly hit yourself in the face.  Of course you shouldn’t be thrusting these two into close quarters right now--they’d probably rip each other to shreds.  “Fuck.  Right.  Well don’t keep sitting there stewing to yourself--go get your car and order out or something.  You have money for the bus?”

“Yeah.”  He smiles at you and flaps a hand, gesturing for you to get moving.  “Tell him I’m sorry, won’t you?”  You roll your eyes and spin around again.  You honestly have no intention of doing any such thing.  The last thing you need is to get in the middle of something.

Sollux is indeed awake when you make your way to the observation room he’s bedded in.  He’s sitting up and feeling on the table beside him for god knows what, his fingers clumsy.  A thick gauze pad is taped over his eye.  Where his eye used to be, you guess?  You think about the last time you got a good look at his face and shiver.  “Hey, Sol,” you say.

He jerks his head in your direction, his ghost eye whipping toward you, and then winces.  “KK?  Jethuth you thound shitty.”  His voice is dry and scratchy like he’s coming down with your cold, and you deduce with your brilliant detective skills that he was looking for water.

“Yeah, says the week-old milk jug to the crusty take-out containers,” you say, coming around the bed to his side and pouring him a glass of water from the pitcher there.  He swivels his head and follows the sound of your footsteps, his face blank.  He jumps when you put the cup in his hand, then gratefully raises it to his lips.  You pull up a chair and slump your sore body into it, keeping both of your functioning eyes locked on him.  “So… you had a shitty night,” you begin.

“Yeah,” he grunts, settling back on his pillow.

“You want to maybe talk about it?”

He shifts one shoulder an inch or so toward his ear and lowers it again, fumbling the glass back to the table.  “No, not really?  Ethpecially not if printheth dickth ith around.”

You snort.  “Princess dicks is going to pick up his car so that we can take you home.  When do you think you’re getting discharged?”

“They thaid thomething like tomorrow morning.  Keeping me a day for obthervation or whatever.  I don’t know what they’re obtherving, I have a fricking hole in my fathe, but what the fuck ever.”  He tilts his head in defiance of medicine, his nose crinkling.  He’s doesn’t like hospitals--you didn’t forget that last night, but at the time it seemed that his need for basic medical assistance offset his discomfort.  Now you can see the semi-conscious distress coming back in the stiffness of his shoulders, the pinch of his face.  You feel a tug on your insides and before you know it, you’re wailing between your fingers, the tears finally coming out.

“Jeguth’th titth, KK, what--”

“Fuck, I’m sorry, Sol,” you say through the hiccupy sobs.  You lean forward and wrap him up in your arms, unconsciously passing along the hug that Eridan gave you last night in the waiting room.  He’s stiff and bony against your front but you don’t care, burying your head under his chin.  “I’m just so fucking glad you’re okay.  I’m a fucking failure of a friend but I’ll get you anything you need right now.”  He pokes at the back of your head.  You pretend that you didn’t snivel all over him and back off a little, patting his pale face.  “Anything at all, Sollux, I'm serious.  This is a once in a lifetime offer but I’m giving it to you free of fucking charge so you’d better take me up on it.”

He swallows, cracking a small, self-deprecating smile.  “Jutht could you maybe… thtay with me?”

“Of fucking course I’m going to.  How could I leave my wreck of a best friend fucking alone like this?” you say, mopping at your running nose.  And you do, because as long as you’re there sitting beside him, asking questions for him when the doctors come in because you know he won’t ask and he’ll regret it later, he seems to be alright.  The only reason you know that he’s not holding it together so well is because when you leave around lunch-time to bully Eridan into fetching you a sub sandwich, a lifetime supply of dayquil, and Sollux’s lithium from the kitchen cabinet, you come back to find him huddled up against the headboard of his bed, his palms pressing into his eyes.

His arms are shaking, either from pain or exertion, and a low, strangled moan emanates from somewhere in his chest.  He grinds his right hand into the bandaging.  That has got to hurt, you think to yourself, frozen to the spot with a plastic bag of supplies in your hand.  You spend an adequate chunk of time in a silent panic before you smother him in another embrace, grabbing at his wrists.  “What the fuck are you doing?” you growl, shaking him.

He only tips his head at you, the anguished expression leeching the color from his features.  “I want to go home, KK,” he says, and your heart stutters.  For a moment he is twelve years old again, sitting in the hallway outside his brother's hospital room.  The last time you heard those words was on the day his brother died.  You slide onto the bed beside him and try to reassure him that it won’t be long at all until you are all back at the apartment eating bad TV dinners on the carpet and bickering about movies.  After some kind of eternity you get him to laugh a little.  You refuse to leave him be after that, and you convince the hospital staff to let you botch the visitations rules when he falls asleep on your shoulder.

Thankfully he makes no signs of flipping his shit anywhere when the doctors wake him up in the morning to examine the wound and give him all the things he’ll need to keep it clean until he comes back for a check-up.  You stand in a corner, fiddling with Eridan’s keys until they sign the release forms and hand him off to you.  The nurses keep handing you pamphlets and brochures, and before you can even get mad you realize they think you will be the one caring for him.  You swallow back a huge surge of trepidation as you consider the ramifications of that brilliant nugget of responsibility.  You’ve basically been his caretaker in the past, sure, when he was hitting bipolar episodes like a slingshot that someone released too soon.  You’ve even had to bath him before, an experience that left both of you emotionally scarred.  But this is a whole other level of shit that you don’t know how to handle--he’s blind, and he’s in pain, and you aren’t sure if you can help with either of those things.  So you hug yourself a little and tell yourself not to try.  

You make a vow to yourself to just deal with shit as it comes at you, which you know will turn out to be a terrible decision in a few days.  He clutches at your shoulder when you lead him outside, his feet scuffing the ground.  You bundle him into a hoodie that Eridan left for you, grab Sollux by the elbow, and try to be a gently-guiding spirit as you haul his skinny ass to Eridan’s car as you resolutely refuse to think about the future.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cheers!


	4. You Grasp At The Ends Of Your Reach And Try To Find Your Inner Glue Before It's Too Late

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What is is going to take to go back to your routine after your roommate is blinded? Much, much more than you know.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow this chapter turned out longer than expected, I split it in two. Expect the other half in a timely manner. As always, enjoy!

You and Terezi were friends back when she was first blinded in the car accident with her mother, and you remember thinking at the time that she just seemed so laid-back about it all.  She was diligent about learning how to do things on her own, almost maniacal when she figured out that pretending to taste colors squicked people out, and she was always vocal about what she wanted or needed.  She is the first person you call when you are reasonably sure that no lisping assholes are listening at your door.  She tells you, with a smile so wide you can hear it through the airwaves, that you must carve three things into your memory: support but don’t coddle, make things easier by creating routines for moving stuff around the apartment, and WATCH OUT FOR DEPRESSION.

“Wait, seriously?” you ask, actively working to keep your voice low enough that he can’t hear you from his room across the hall.  “What, you mean because he’s bipolar or what?  Explain to me what the fuck you mean by depression, Terezi.”

“I mean, you grumpy old dog, that you need to watch out for depression,” she says, clicking her teeth into her phone’s mouthpiece.  She’s shuffling papers in the background, probably from her boss’ latest case, and you have no doubt that she is sitting on her bed hugging one of her stuffed dragons while she feels them over.

“I need clarification here, you little blind hag.  I didn’t call you to get things repeated at me indefinitely.”

She gives an indulgent sigh.  “Okay, Karkles, I’ll break it down just for you.  He just lost a major sensory organ, leaving him with a severe disability that’s going to impact everything he does from now on.  It’s very common for people to swing low when shit like that happens.  A newly blind person doesn’t have to be bipolar to get depression because of major life changes, you know.”

You fall backwards onto your bed, feeling around for your tissue box, as you consider that.  “What do I do if he does fall into depression?” you ask finally, dreading the answer.

“You do what you would normally do, obviously.  I thought you knew how to do all this stuff already?”

“As a blind person, not as a bipolar asshat!” you say, much too loud, and thrust your knuckles into your mouth to shut yourself up.  You count to ten while she laughs at you.

“You take him to the doctor, Karkalicious, honestly!  And find support groups.  Lots and lots of support groups.  And do what you can to make it as easy for him as possible, because no matter what this is going to be a fucking roller coaster of nearly uncertain doom!  Now, if you don’t mind I have a prosection draft to write up for my boss.  Go forth and multiply!”

“That is really not why I called,” you say through gritted teeth, but she’s already hung up on you.  Her obnoxious laugh follows you even after you chuck your phone across the room.  You grind your teeth, and in a fit of anger assure yourself that you are prepared for anything.  He’s a human sized stick bug, what could even happen?

Much, much more than you bargained for, as it turns out.  Sollux is about as close to the polar opposite of laid-back as it is possible to be.  It is clear from the get-go that he isn’t going to take this well at all.  The first week with him home again is harder than you expect, and you, being the pessimistic asshole you are, expect some hard-core temper tantrums, a few honest shouting matches that would probably turn out to be cathartic in some weird, spiritual indictment of a God Of Wrath sort of way, and maybe an attempt on Eridan’s life or four.  You even take Terezi’s warning into consideration, and take extra care to handle his meds yourself.  You do not expect what actually happens.  You do not expect to get front row tickets to watch a full grown man fall apart in your insufficient, inexperienced arms.  

Eridan takes the initiative of cleaning up the kitchen and picking up most of his stuff before you get back, leaving you a note saying that he’s staying with his parents until things cool off.  He calls you a few hours after your lovely talk with Terezi, asking if you think he could come back soon.

“Just give him space,” you say.  Then amend, “And not like you do when you tick off Feferi, okay.  By space I mean keep all your comments and suggestions to yourself until I tell you you are in the clear.”

You mention the conversation in passing to Sollux, on your way to your morning class on his first day out of the hospital.  He shrugs in response, feeling his way down the hall to the bathroom.  You pause on your way out the door to come back and help him because you can plainly see that he’s about to trip and faceplant over the cords winding away from the outlet in the hallway, and he says nothing at all to you.  You leave him at the bathroom door, slap him on the back, and leave, hurrying back as soon as you can.  You tell yourself that you are doing good.

He acts as cold as it is possible for a human being to be for the first few days, pretending that he doesn’t feel anything as you guide him around the house, cleaning up the usual shit that clutters pathways.  He doesn’t say a word about how clumsy his is as he tries to use utensils without being able to see his plate, or mention your awkward mumbling as you help him strip and sit on the edge of the tub so that you can poke at his bandages and clean out the (wince) empty socket where his good eye used to be.

He speaks mostly in short, stunted phrases, lacking his usual sass, and at first you chalk it up to pain because he tells you that every time he moves his remaining eye too fast he gets a stab of agony right in the eye socket.  You fuss over him, fetch tylenol and ice packs when a nasty shiner develops under the eye socket, and email his teachers when he isn’t listening at your door.  You sniffle yourself to sleep every night only after he’s crashed in his room with his music turned on.

You hazard one day to ask if you should do something with his computer system, your voice giving away your worry.  That’s when he starts to lash out.

After three more days you are starting to produce less than lethal amounts of snot, and you’ve come to the conclusion that he isn’t in pain.  Not physical pain, anyway.  He is definitely hurting, that is becoming clearer the longer you watch him, but it isn’t his eye that’s the real problem.  The ache is in his bones, his brain, his mind.  You ask him if he needs help finding his clothes in the morning and he snarls at you.  He physically pushes you away when you move to take his elbow and lead him through the kitchen, afraid that he’ll put a hand on a hot burner.  His voice rises whenever you go to offer help, and then he locks himself in his room and refuses to come out.

You flounder when you finally realize it.  Terezi was right.  As the end of the week wears by and it gets harder and harder to talk to him through the door, you finally pin it down for what it is: he’s in a downswing.  All six million hours of your past blundering culminate into a great cage of failure made all the worse by the fact that it took you so moronically long to figure out that he’s depressed.  The thing is that he sounded like he was bored and annoyed whenever you sat him down to talk, which is completely understandable considering that he was recently eliminated from the list of those who can sense photons and you were hovering all over him day and night--how were you supposed to know how bad it was?  You couldn’t realize that his silences are screams of pain.

God, why didn’t you realize?

Terezi, as much as it irks you to admit, was also right about another thing, though.  You do know how to deal with most of his moods.  He’s been your friend for nigh on fourteen years--it happens.  Every couple months he hits his lows hard enough to break through the normally stabilizing sway of his medication, and when he does god forbid you try and talk to him.  A depressed Sollux is a terrible, silently self-loathing Sollux.  The best option is always to back off for a day or two, and then stampede in with friends and food and make him eat until he isn’t lying in a puddle of his own despair and moaning.

But you are alone in the house with him, Eridan is gone, your mutual friends are scattered, and your worry is beginning to overcome your instincts.

You sit alone in the living room at the end of the week, chastising yourself for everything you’ve done tactlessly since he got back, expecting the silent rift in the house to keep growing, seething, turning every effort you make into an ineffective, stagnant mess of good intentions.  The TV glares meaningless static at you--you think you’re watching reality television but you can’t decipher the objective of their fake tans for shit.  Your insides snarl up like jungle vines.  You haven’t really had a bad anxiety attack since you started college, but you’re having one now and you want to swallow your own brain and put yourself out of your misery.  You are honestly terrified right now, unable to bridge the gap between you and Sollux.  You are failing.  Past you paved the path with all the wrong decisions you could ever make, and now here you are, completely lost in the turmoil of life, unable to see anything but your ineffective failures.  You are explicitly aware of how close you are to flipping out.  You clamp your mouth shut and slouch down into the back of the couch before your brain threatens to take on the likeness of a ballistic missile.

And it very well could have if Eridan hadn’t chosen that moment to shuffle in as you’re sitting there, his entire body a smudge of sheepishness, a little box in his hand.  He nods to you as he walks in, and you are too caught up in your own private suffering that at first you don’t do anything.

“Hey, Sol?” he calls, walking in like he didn’t rescind his invitation to enter the abode once the first cheap asian eating utensil entered your best friend’s skull crevices, and your wound up body bounces to its feet, up in arms.  He lasted longer than you thought he would, but as he glances down the hall you decide that you have to put up at least a token effort in keeping him in his goddamn place, the fucking PRICK.

“What part of ‘give him space’ is your bloated, egotistical mass of gray matter butchering?” you hiss, hurtling to push yourself into his face before wind of this fiasco can make it into Sollux’s black hole of a room.

To his credit, Eridan looks sufficiently chagrined.  He flushes a little, shuffling around in his Toms.  “I, uh… thought I could try and start makin’ it up to him?”  You eye him blandly, waiting for more.  He swallows.  “Like, I know that I can’t give him back what I took from him and all, but I figured that… if I could, like, do some nice things and send some good karma his w-way that I could maybe balance it out a little.  And I brought Gam!  With cupcakes!”  At the mention of his name, Gamzee sidles around the door-frame and gives you a dopey kind of wave.  He doesn’t manage to look nearly as self-conscious as he should, considering that there is a smear of batter drying in his dreads.  You glare at him, crossing your arms and staring at the plate he’s nearly hugging to his chest.  Chocolate, huh.

You blow out through your mouth as hard as you can, rubbing at your prickling eyes.  You have to admit that you didn’t expect such a thought-out presentation of apology from Eridan Ampora, but you’ve seen weirder things.  And even you know full well how difficult it is to remain unhappy when you have a batch of Gam’s chocolate cupcakes in your lap.  With Sollux, however, things that you would normally deem ‘sacred’ or ‘universal’ often get turned on their head.  You kind of scrunch up your face, eyeing Eridan’s forced cheerful expression.  “So you are going to make it up to him by buying him things and bullying people into making presents that you can shove under his nose,” you say, testing out how that feels.  It feels vaguely like… hope.  Eridan has the gall to look offended as you appraise him, turning from him to Gamzee and back and daring to hope that even though they are unexpected, socially inept party crashers, they are what you can’t provide.  Oh, god, do you hope they are what Sollux needs right now.

“I don’t think that’s really accurate of a summary, Kar, and I don’t appreciate you cheapenin' my gestures of contriteness--”

You roll your eyes, swallowing hard before you wave Gamzee all the way in.  He drifts through the door, his limbs long and lanky and scarily accurate in how they swing one in front of the other.  He begins wandering down the hallway.  Eridan looks after him, his eyebrows pinched, but you take him by the arm before he can follow.  “Whatever, don’t mind the insults on the insincerity of your apology, it’s not my business,” you say.  You bite your lip and look closely at him.  “I just thought I should warn you before you go making a fool of yourself that he’s, uh.  Kind of under the weather.”

“He’s taking the equivalent of like, fuckin’ horse tranqs, Kar, of course he’s--wait.  Wait, you mean he’s--?”

You nod and he groans aloud, flippant, as if he doesn’t have the time to deal with the very real, very frightening depression of the guy he blinded.  You were ready to forgive him for his tresspasses, even if Sollux didn’t, but at that you stopper up once more and stare, your disbelief burning holes through your frontal lobes.  It’s that flippancy, that total disregard for the severity of the situation, that finally pushes your switch over from the-situation-is-handled to I’M-GOING-TO-FLIP-MY-SHIT-AND-TAKE-YOU-DOWN-WITH-ME.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If there is anything problematic that you feel the need to point out to me, comments are always there! I am not, nor do I know anyone who is, blind. I am going off of google for most of the info here.  
> Also, it's a work of fiction. I'm hoping some liberties are fine?  
> Cheers!


	5. You Discover Your Inner Glue And Comfort A Friend

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What happens after you get blinded? Friends, is the answer. Friends happen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Introducing Gamzee, bad idea extraordinaire.  
> We haven't even gotten to the fun part yet.

“ARE YOU KIDDING ME?” you scream, advancing on Eridan.  He has enough decency to back away as you stalk forward, holding up his hands.  He bumps into the wall and you grab him by the pretentious-purple-hipster shirt and yank his stupidly tall swimmer’s body down to your level.  “ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME RIGHT NOW?  WHAT GIVES YOU THE RIGHT TO COME WALTZING IN HERE GUNG-HO LIKE YOU DIDN’T SEVERELY DISABLE A MAN, WHO IS BOTH MY FRIEND AND YOURS, FOR DEPLORABLE, ASININE REASONS?  WHAT MADE UP, FICTIONAL, ALTRUISTICALLY MORONIC FAKE GOD GAVE YOU THE FICTITIOUS FUCKING PRIVILEGE TO BRUSH ASIDE THE VERY REAL, VERY SERIOUS MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES OF MY FUCKING ROOMMATE?  I HAD HOPES FOR YOU, ERIDAN-GODFUCKING-AMPORA, AND DO YOU KNOW WHAT THOSE HOPES DID WHEN I SAW THAT FUCKING GRIMACE YOU JUST DISPLAYED AT THE MENTION OF SAID MENTAL ISSUES?  THEY DIED SLOW, AGONIZING DEATHS.  EVERY SINGLE FUCKING HOPE I EVER HARBORED FOR YOU IS DEAD AND BURIED.  THEY ARE SO FAR OBLIVIATED THAT I WOULD FEEL PERSONAL INDIGNITY IF A WOODLAND FAIRY MELTED OUT OF THE OAK OF MY COFFEE TABLE AND TRIED TO TELL ME THAT YOU DESERVE A SECOND CHANCE.  WIPE THE FUCKING SLIME FROM YOUR PERSONALITY, AMPORA, BEFORE I FUCKING TOSS YOU INTO THE NEAREST GARBAGE CAN.”

Eridan puts up weak protests while you pause, panting for air, but you’re already started and the frustration of the past week is oozing out of your pores even as you shout.  You don’t realize how quiet you’ve been until you stop, and it is honestly an enormous weight off your chest to yell.  You blink.  Then you remember why you haven’t been yelling, and you deflate as if somebody took a sewing needle to you like an over-inflated balloon.  You shove Eridan away from you, an urge to knock the box out of his hands rising within you, but you don’t act on it because for the first time you become aware of someone leaning in the hallway, head cocked toward you and Eridan.  Gamzee stands behind him, faint worry lines creasing his paint, holding the plate of cupcakes over his head and looking between you and Eridan.  Gamzee looks ready to bolt, but you don’t feel quite so bad about smearing all over his pacifist ideologies as you do about taking Sollux’s issues and shouting them for the whole world to hear.

You shove your hands in your pockets, clearing your throat.  You gesture uselessly with an elbow.  “I defended your honor, Captor.  Don’t thank me,” you say, because you lack filters and that gem is the first thing that comes to mind to blurt out.  You decide you need to invest in a muzzle.

He’s only wearing dirty sweatpants, the bandage over his eye is in dire need of changing, and the cupcake in his hand is the first thing you’ve seen him eat in forty-eight hours, but all the same you feel something in your chest loosening up as he kind of smirks.  “Great.  Honor defended.  Can we keep the shouting down or thomething?  I need at leatht one thenthory function to thtill work come morning, thankth.”

“Yeah,” you say, and you cough a little into your elbow.  “Consider volume control on.”

He nods, and then Gamzee gives him a little prod in the back and he begins to feel his way into the room, nudging movie cases aside with his toes.  The entire room seems to freeze around him as he works his way across to the couch.  You bite your lip but stay back until he flops down, sitting as low as his long legs will allow and resting his head on the armrest.  “I’m good, KK,” he says, as if reading your mind, and you take the opportunity to flop next to him as aggressively as you dare.  His face is still kind of taut with emotion, and he curls up a little around his cupcake, but his knee brushes against yours in assurance.  You begin to relax just the smallest bit.  Then he crinkles his eyebrows and says, “Hey, ED.”

You can practically feel the nerves rolling off of Eridan from across the room.  “Hey, Sol,” he says, his voice squeaking just a little.  “I’m here because I have somethin’ for you.  Not that that’s the only reason!  I mean, I’m also here to say sorry, w-which is definitely a thing that I’m goin’ ta do.  It’s just, uh… w-well, here.”

He shoves the box into Sollux’s hand and quickly backs up.

You have to admit that you are harboring some killer curiosity about what Eridan thought could make up for the present situation, but the last thing you expect to see is a fashion disaster that would kill Kanaya on the spot.  He and Kanaya have been collaborating for years trying to neaten the rest of you up, and it probably goes against every fiber of his fashion-sensible being to offer any eyewear in 3D colors, but there they are.  Sollux feels each eye patch slowly, the pads of his fingers dipping into the cups and stroking the strings, his cheek still resting on the side of the couch.  His face gives nothing away.

“I had to go to a really fuckin’ ridiculous online place to find matchin’ scarlet and royal blue eyepatches, so I hope you like them.”  Eridan shifts, straightening his purple shirt until the silence grows too loud for him and he says, quiet and shy, “I’m really sorry, Sol.”

“ED?” Sollux says.  Eridan swallows audibly.  You tense, waiting for something to blow up, but it doesn’t happen.  Sollux only sits up, holding the eyepatches out to Eridan and gesturing at his own face.  “Help me out?”

You officially mark Eridan and Sollux’s relationship as ‘aliens in some bizarre sort of alien love’, shaking your head as Eridan grins and skips forward to tie the eyepatches in place.  Sollux doesn’t smile in return--you guess he probably doesn’t know that Eridan is slobbering affection and teeth all over his mangy hair--but he allows Eridan to fuss and straighten the ties and generally doesn’t complain.

A moment later you are surprised again as Sollux ponderously stands up and wraps Eridan up in an awkward embrace, slapping his back and completing the circle of hugs.  Eridan looks like he’s going to start crying right there as he clings back.  Then, as soon as the moment began, Sollux pulls back and begins shuffling toward his room again.  “I’m going back to thleep,” he says over his shoulder, and you watch with a sigh as his bony back retreats.

“Nah, brother, you be needin’ some motherfucking food!” Gamzee says, intercepting him like you knew he would.  He clamps Sollux to his side and turns back to you, his face lighting up.  “Hey Karbro, what if I whipped up some motherfucking chow all blind-like to make him feel all sorts of good and warm inside?”

“You want to what,” you say, staring at him.  Sollux squirms in his grip, groaning.  You sort through the request a second time as Gamzee smiles dopily at you, trying to figure the guy out.  You’ve known Gamzee nearly as long as you’ve known Sollux, but people don’t generally guess that because you understand exactly jack shit about the guy.  All you really know is that he’s chill to the bones until you bring up his brother and his dad, and then things get nasty.  You rub the bridge of your nose.  “You want to cook blind food?” you ask tentatively, squinting at him.  “Like what, a blind fish or something?”

“You know, be all cooking and and bein’ a motherfucking supportive bro with my eyes all covered.”  He motions behind his wild hair, miming tying a blindfold.  Sollux makes a face as his head gets pinned momentarily between Gamzee’s bicep and his chest.  Eridan sniggers.  Sollux raises a middle finger in his general direction.

You stare at all three of them, wondering which one of them wins the award for dumbest asshole you know.  You decide it’s probably the juggalo.  “Gamzee.  You cannot use fire for long periods of time without the use of your eyeballs.  I’ve been the ER once this month and I’d rather not go again.”

“Aw, brother, it ain’t any sorts of hard to be motherfucking doing.  Terecita’s got me all thrilled and skilled with the motherfucking see-less skillets, you dig?”

“No,” you say, easing Sollux out of his armpit and guiding him to a kitchen chair.  “That is fucking final, Gamzee.  You will cook blind over my dead body.”

“Aw,” Gamzee says, pouting.  “Can a brother at least be getting his motherfucking support on with his eating afterward, though?”

You consider it.  “Alright, fine.  You can blindfold yourself like a fruitbat after you’re done cooking.  Just don’t come whining to me when you two run smack into each other and fall on your asses.”

You settle on the counter as Gamzee works, keeping an eye on everything even though cooking is one of the only things that he can do without fucking up too much.  He moves like the blades of a blender as he whirls around, chopping this and adding spice to that, until he finally fishes your bowls out of the cabinet and serves you.  You find yourself right across from Sollux, one of Eridan’s hideous scarves tied over your eyes to, quote, “cheer up the blindbro,” as you settle down to eat.  Gamzee sits beside you guffawing like a puppy with too much energy, shoveling his stew around and getting it everywhere if the splashes are any indication.  Eridan is on your other side, picking at his food in what you think he assumes are dainty sips but actually sound constipated.  You spend most of your time grunting and trying to avoid both of their elbows.

You can’t hear much from Sollux as lunch goes on, but every once in a while you do hear what could be a half-muffled snicker.  You presume that Gamzee is doing his job as a touchy-feely feelings person, patting him on the shoulder and ruffling his hair as he sits, and the thought makes you smile despite yourself.  You are so glad that everyone around you right now is blind, at least temporarily.

You can tell Gamzee is finished when he shoves his bowl aside and crawls out of his chair, settling on his haunches on your kitchen table.  “Solbro,” he says, excited, and you flap a hand hoping to smack him in the knee.  You miss.

“Hmm?” Sollux says, sucking on his spoon.  You can tell that he’s drained and that he’ll be slipping back into his room as soon as your guests leave, but for now he’s still present.  You slide your spoon toward him across the table and he shoves it back in your direction.

“I was all forgetting that our pal Terezi sent me over with a motherfucking gift, all for your lovely ears.”  He flops back onto his placemat, making Eridan screech as his feet enter the swimmer’s bowl, and begins unzipping pockets in his enormous paint-splattered pants.  “I’ve got it right here, bro, just hold your motherfucking glory horses for a motherfucking bit and I’ll fetch it for you.”

“Right.  Becauthe I need anything from TZ that hath been in your dithguthting pantth,” Sollux snorts, and Eridan flat out giggles at his tone.  “Thtuff it up your gillth,” Sollux directs at him, without much invective.  The two of them go back and forth for a little bit until Gamzee lets out a happy noise and swings something in Sollux’s direction.

You peek under your blindfold at what Gamzee is holding--it’s a bright orange jewel CD case, with a silver CD nestled inside.  Sollux reaches forward until he finds Gamzee’s wrist and gently takes it, turning it over in his fingers.  He tilts his head, stroking the edges until he finds the lid and easing it open.  He touches the CD inside.  “What ith thith?”

“It’s a miracle, bro,” Gamzee says, far away now that he’s completed his mission.  “You were all a motherfucking computer whiz, bro, but now you need a new motherfucking plane of existence to be getting your type on.”

You wait a moment more, but he doesn’t elaborate so you snatch the CD and begin reading the description aloud.  “Soundwaves Auditory Processing--the audible visual description software for all your audio-visual needs.  Converts all on-screen text to easily understood pre-recorded speech.  Comes with english-spanish translation.  Ha!  I knew she was lying when she said she could smell incoming messages.”  You toss the CD back to Sollux and give Gamzee a whack on the stomach, which earns you nothing but a lazy swat back.  He grins at you underneath his scarf.

“Shit…” Sollux says, sucking in a breath.  “Fuck, you gotta thank TZ for me, GZ.  Shit I… I really needed thith.”

“No problems, my blindbro,” Gamzee says, and the way his breathing is slowing down it looks like he’s going to start falling asleep where he’s lying.  You slide his blindfold off and haul him up, handing both your scarf and his back to Eridan, who still hasn’t taken his own off and who is looking very confused about what everyone is talking about.  A few minutes later you’ve managed to shove them out the door, promising Eridan the whole way that he can move back in tomorrow, and finally let out the air in your lungs.  God, they can be exhausting.

Speaking of, you wander back to the kitchen expecting Sollux to be long gone.  You are halfway through washing the first bowl in the sink when you realize that he’s still in his seat, huddled around the CD.  The eyepatches lie on the table in front of him, carefully spread one next to the other. You throw your wash-cloth down in a squirt of soap bubbles and wipe your hands off on your pants, walking over to him.

“Hey,” you say as gently as your vocal chords are able, bumping his shoulder with your side.  “How you feeling, buddy?  Ready for bed yet?”

He chokes.

“Oh, fuck!” you say, kneeling down beside him and pulling him against you.  He leans into you, his breath hitching against your neck, crying tears that sound like his intestines are being wrenched up his esophagus.  You fist your hands into the back of his hair, rub his bare back with your knuckles, as if you can make him feel better by the force of your worry.  You hold him as close as you can, squeezing his frail body against your thicker one, willing the pain to end.  “Christ,” you say, muffled because your mouth is pressed into his hair.  “Fucking christ.”

“Chritht wath an athhole,” he hiccups, holding his stomach.  Tears keep streaming down his chin onto your shoulder, and his teeth chatter no matter how hard you feel his jaw clenching.  

You snort and hug a little tighter, wrapping him up in your short, stubby arms.  “Yes, yes he fucking was,” you say.  He feels bony and uncomfortable in your grip but you absolutely refuse to let him go until his breath evens out and he wipes his face clean, shoving you away and picking up his CD before he shuffles to his room. You keep an eye on him the whole way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cheers!


	6. You Condemn Your Inner Glue And Stumble Headlong Into Divinity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Who's responsible for those freak accidents? Well, She is.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Enter Aradia. XD

You get home on the day you meet Her with a bandaid on your thumb, an appointment to drive your recalcitrant roommate to the optometrist looming on the event horizon, and a terrifyingly strong sense of deja vu winding around your guts.  You pad through the door on the balls of your feet, looking around at the apartment.  The only thing you hear is Sollux shuffling behind you, about two seconds away from pushing you out of his way.  You go to ask him if he feels weird and have to clear your throat.  You cough.

And then the feeling lifts, and you’re left standing there like the cornered crab that’s going to become dinner in six point eight seconds if it doesn’t get it’s ass in gear and make a run for it.  That, too, fades in seconds and you nearly laugh out loud.  Stupid dust.  You swing your backpack off and toss it at the couch, marching to the kitchen for a glass of water and the coffee you accidentally left behind that morning, because you are not having this tickle-in-your-throat thing.  Sollux comes in after you, grumbling to himself about having to wait for your taffy-ass to move all the time, and immediately swings right, taking his laptop into the eternal darkness of his room where you dare not follow.  Not because you would want to, because walking the prick to his classes all week has given you not only a ripping headache but multiple whip-marks all over your knees from the straight walking cane that, ha ha, you helped him buy after hassling the insurance company got you exactly nowhere.  He’s been using it more to hit you whenever he thinks you’re too close than he does to avoid obstacles.  He insists it’s accidental.  You still pinch him whenever he does it, because accidental or not, it hurts like a bitch.  Fuck, do you hate him.

If you had the option of sitting Sollux Captor down in the kitchen, moving across the country, and sitting yourself down two thousand miles away just to fucking chill for a minute, you honestly would.  You need a break.  Because of course you are the one who deals with the half a dozen spontaneous crying jags, hauls his sorry ass to the doctor when he wants to claw his way into the furniture and hide there, and convinces him that yeah, he has to go to class, because they are NEARLY PAYING HIM TO GET HIS COMP-SCI BACHELORS.  At least now things are smoothing out.  You are hashing out boundaries.  You wouldn’t return to that first week if someone offered you free access to all silver screen movies in theaters for the rest of your life, because that, friends, is what hell looks like.  It is highly unpleasant.  The next time it happens you are going to call Terezi and have her come and bully him into functioning, because you cannot do it.  You feel traumatized.

You can still handle the less-than-dire shit, though, and right now you have things to do.  You can’t just put off dealing with him forever.  So you suck it up, clutch your coffee close to your chest, and badger him into the car with exactly two minutes to spare before his appointment is supposed to start.  He scrunches himself into a ball against the passenger window, hugging his phone.  “Hey dipshit, have I told you that you thuck at handling motor vehicleth?” he says conversationally.  He has.  You grunt.

When you walk into the frigidly air-conditioned building, you busy yourself with staying well out of the way of his sweeping cane, watching as unobtrusively as you can while he counts steps to the counter in the front to sign in.  There are two people working today: the one guy who has been hit on by Eridan a minimum of three times that you know about, before you thought better of him tagging along to appointments.  The other is a girl you have never seen before.  As you approach the guy gets one look at the two of you and vanishes into thin air, leaving the partition between the lobby and the staff room swinging.  Sollux sniggers as it squeaks.  The girl, however, beams and leans forward.  “Hello, sir.  How can I help you?”

“You can help him by teaching him basic manners,” you mutter, standing off to the side, but Sollux only smiles and puts his hands on the counter.

“I’m here to pick up,” he says.  He’s wearing enormous black shades, courtesy of Dave, instead of his normal anaglyph glasses.  You guess that’s a point for him, because in the aviators he only looks pervy.  You nearly shit yourself the first time he wore the 3Ds after the bandages came off--under the red lense his dead eye is the fresh color of Satan’s asshole, while the blue lense creates a portal into the infinite fields of Hades through the blank, empty socket.  He’s totally nonchalant with the knowledge that he looks like a half-possessed zombie; he laughs when you suggest in all seriousness that he take mercy and throw the damn things into the nearest pit of snakes.

The girl, who obviously hasn’t yet realized that she’s dealing with a guy who is completely and utterly blind because she keeps peeping at him through her lashes, gets his name and writes it on the clipboard hanging on the wall beside her.  She begins cross-referencing the name on her computer, looking for his appointment information.  “You’re here for… an eye prosthetic, is that correct?  Custom colored, solid black?”

Sollux grins, displaying his teeth, which should be instant female repellant but somehow never is.  You are baffled.  “That’th me.  I need a demon eye to balanthe out the angelic one locked on your pretty fathe,” he says, smooth as chunky soup, and lowers the shades on his nose until the white eye is angled toward her.  You nearly smack yourself in the face.  Why doesn’t this guy get dates again?  Oh, right, because he comes out with pearls like that.

This girl, however, only laughs.  “Your doctor will call you back in about ten minutes.  Make yourself comfortable in the meantime.  And I’m no angel--better to keep both eyes on me.”

“Ah, touche,” Sollux says, leaning a little further.  He winks the ‘angel’ eye at her with the sloppiest flirting face you have ever had the anti-fortune of witnessing.  “I’ll be set for a date after my appointment, then,” he says, and pokes a finger into the empty socket.

The girl gasps.  You physically wince.  The wound still isn’t very pretty, probably never will be, even though the scabbing has healed up.  You’re pretty sure he just fucked up whatever version of mating he was going for.  Good job Sollux.  You are about to grab him by the collar and apologize to the woman for his tactless harassment as you push him out the door, but then she leans forward to get a closer look.  “Surgical removal, huh.  Recent, too.  A medical issue?”

“Nah, not that one,” Sollux says with one of his signature quirk-of-the-shoulder shrugs.  “Got a little ekthited during dinner one day.”

“That’s an understatement,” you say, still staring at him like he’s a sea sponge, but neither of them glance in your direction.  Sollux waves you off.  “Cool,” you mutter, and leave them alone to their backwards flirtational clusterfuck.  You throw yourself into a chair.  It isn’t like you really care at all about what he does or doesn’t do to women in public.  Honestly.  It’s the last thing on your mind.

You hunch in on yourself and listen in as the girl asks about the cataract and he gives her the usual pity-me story.  The ‘it’th congenital, had it thinthe I wath a baby.  Even if I got thurgery now I probably couldn’t thee jack’ story.  Which is technically true, but he manages to make it sound ten times sadder than it really ought to.  You huff to yourself.  By the time you get called to the back he’s got her number in his phone and a self-satisfied smirk smeared across his gross teeth, and you decide that you just do not understand human dating structures at all.  When the disgusting nerd with the sensitivity of a bullfrog hooks dates better than the guy who spends his free time analyzing romco--okay, you are a very bitter person, you understand that.  That is definitely a thing you understand.  You are going to stop thinking now.

You manage to keep your disbelief to yourself through a massive force of will, and sit in one of the chairs by the door of the dark, cramped exam room.  You suffer through the explanations of removing, cleaning, and replacing the eye because you know that you’ll be the one writing up schedules and sticking notes to the handle of the fridge to remind him.  Twenty minutes later you leave with all your hair standing on edge, the sound of the prosthetic eye popping into place locked in your memory, and the girl at the front offers a cheery, “Goodbye, guys!  See you soon!”  Sollux makes his way past with a wave and a grin.  You don’t miss the cheesy wink he sends her way, this time with the demonic eye, but you don’t comment.  You’re too busy rubbing goosebumps out of your arms.

“Home?” you ask in a disturbingly high voice, patting yourself down shakily for the keys.

“Ith that helium I hear?”  He turns his gaze toward you, his head tilted back to give the impression that he’s looking down his nose.  You will admit that the monochrome dichotomy of his eyes now suits his personality perfectly, considering that he’s an asshole half the time.  You grunt at him and slam the car door closed, cranking it into gear and grinding down on the clutch.  “Kidding, KK,” he says, pulling his seatbelt on and flicking his phone on.  The voice-over begins talking to him in stunted syllables almost too fast for you to understand.  “Actually, there’th thomething I want to do.”

“If you think I’m going to chauffeur you to a date with little miss eye fetish in there, you are dead wrong,” you grunt, but when he shoves the phone into your lap you don’t see anything that has to do with random hookups, or at least you sincerely hope.  “What the fuck is that,” you say.

“An adreth, you newb.  Jethuth, you’re thuppothed to be the bright one out of you and ED.  It’th a danthe thtudio, before you athk.”

“What could you possibly want with a dance studio?” you gripe, snatching his phone.  You peer at the address and scroll down.  The page looks like a facebook flier for some dance event, and there are a bunch of pictures of fancy jewelry and very curvy girls wearing nothing but bra tops, long sweeping dresses, and cascades of bangles.  You come to the bottom and find absolutely no reason at all for him to have any strong feelings about going or not going.  You flop back into your seat, toeing the gas pedal and revving the engine while you wait for some sort of answer.

“I feel like I’m supposed to,” he says after a long pause, which is a statement that makes it abundantly clear why the blind guy wants to go ‘see’ a belly dancing show.  You snort and open your mouth to begin arguing, because you have had a ridiculously long day and you would like to melt into your couch for an hour or two before you have to go to bed, but when you look over his face is unfocused.  His eyes have drifted half closed, and this time you actually do snap in front of his nose, trying to snap him out of it.  He doesn’t move, except maybe to scrunch up his eyebrows in his kind-of-pasty-all-of-a-sudden face.  You have officially lost him to the land of the living.  You sigh.

“Okay, man, if you’re bent on it then we’ll go check it out or whatever,” you say, shoving down the parking brake.  He nods a little in your peripheral vision, his chin dipping low.  He shuts his mouth and you feel the need to reach over and pinch him on the thigh just to reassure yourself that he’s still there.  He swats your hand away when you do, which you take as affirmation, but he remains mostly withdrawn.

He’s quiet all the way to the studio, and for some inexplicable reason he leaves the cane behind and grabs onto your shoulder when you get out of the car and head for the door.  You stop and stare at him for a long moment, before you remember that duh, Karkat, he’s blind.  “Is something up?” you ask.

“Nah,” he says, but he’s obviously fidgeting.  He nudges you forward a little.  “Keep walking, I don’t want to be in the thun.”

“Basement dweller,” you mutter, but you begin leading him all the same.

The studio is one enormous room with a raised platform in one corner that you suppose is the stage area.  The dancing hasn’t started yet--somewhere in the background a strong drum beat is playing, which a few people are swaying to halfheartedly.  No one is sitting in the rows of folding chairs set out in a loose arch--they’re milling around, chit-chatting in clusters.  Some tables are set around the edges of the space, covered in enormous belts and head-dresses with coins and shiny things sewn on, and a bunch of women are oohing and ahing all over them, tying them onto each other and admiring themselves in the wall-length mirrors.  Wispy scarves and large, sweeping clothes seem to be the trend around here--your khaki pants feel suddenly very plain, and a swift glance at Sollux tells you that yes, he is standing out like a sore thumb in his skinny jeans and minecraft shirt.  You edge inside, wary that you are now among a crowd of more than fifty people that you do not understand at all.  You are ready to flatten yourself to a wall and take Sollux with you when you spot a familiar face.

“Kanaya!” you call, waving her over.  She has on a jade and black sari that wraps gracefully around her tall frame, and enormous jingling hoops adorn her ears.  Her head dips down to you once, displaying a jeweled band woven into her coiffed hair.  “Thank fuck,” you say, grabbing her by the arm.  “I thought the nerding wonder here was fucking with me.”

“I’m afraid I don’t remember inviting you, Sollux.  Apologies, but it seemed like the best option considering that you’ve never showed interest before,” she says, sidestepping the disability landmine with grace.  She brushes her fingertips on his hand lightly as she speaks, letting him know that she’s closeby and is glad to see him anyway.  You’ve always been in awe of how she moves, with every intention right there for the world to see, expression mingling with elegance.  You sniff into your sleeve.  The incense is getting a little strong.

“Thorry, KN, I didn’t realize you were even here.  I’m actually looking for one of the dantherth,” Sollux says.  You can’t help but turn a befuddled look on Kanaya because who the fuck could he possibly know who belly dances that neither of you are aware of, but before she can reply he whips his head toward the corner of the room and whispers, “There she is,” even though there is no possible way he should be able to tell through the meandering people that a woman just stepped onto the stage with footsteps so airy that her feet hardly touch the ground.  She has so much hair that it hangs in a cloud about her waist.  A long, blood red shawl swims over her shoulders, hiding her midriff from view.  She looks just like a regular dancer on first glance, like she just happened to step on stage before the show began to check out the crowd.

“I’ve never seen her before,” Kanaya says, but Sollux is long gone.  He leans on your shoulder and his head falls forward, as if he’s about to black out.  When you catch a glimpse of his cheek, you are nearly startled into letting go of him--his face is stretched into the widest, sincerest smile you have ever seen on him.

“Yeth, you have,” he says, about as cryptic as it’s possible to be with a severe speech impediment.  You exchange a skeptical look with Kanaya and lean forward to see better, and that’s when it hits you.  You know this girl.  You have seen her with your own eyes.  Not once, not twice, you have seen her more times than you can count.  You saw her today, in the eye doctor’s.  You saw her three weeks ago at the ER.  You saw her the day you and Sollux graduated from high school, at the assembly the first day of college, during Sollux’s ninth birthday party at the public pool.  She is so familiar that you feel like she is slipping away when you think too hard about her.  She is an inflammation in your memory--you must know her so well, so why is it that you cannot place her?

No one turns her way except for you, Kanaya and Sollux.  She silently slips the shawl from her shoulders, begins to dance, out of sync with the music.  Her hips jut and bounce, striking angles against her stomach, her thighs.  Her ribs spread under her skin as she rolls her body, like thin fingers of bone stretching and reaching for something just out of grasp.  Her arms rise above her head, long hands stroking the air.  Fabric swishes hard and fast about her ankles, and you feel Sollux sway beside you, his chewed-off fingernails digging into the spaces between your bones.

Then she turns to the three of you, whipping her body around, her hair flowing endless about her.  Sollux’s eyes lock onto her, as if she had just spoken his name.  You grab onto Kanaya’s hand and grip it tight.  A sudden spike of deja vu, more solid than the stuff you felt that afternoon, nails you right between the eyes.  When you turn to Kanaya, your whole body twisted up like you just got injected with adrenaline, you see confusion and worry and awe swirling across her face, just as you assume they are on yours.  By the time you look back to the stage, the girl is plain and simply gone, just like a ghost.

A ghost, or a Goddess.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cheers~


	7. You Are Invited To Hang Out At The House Of Gods

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sollux===>Sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, I am switching narratives for part two of this fic! Karkat's POV has now been replaced by Sollux's.

PART TWO

 

Sollux===>Sleep.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Your name is Sollux Captor.  

 

...

You think you might be dead.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cheers~

**Author's Note:**

> If you've read more than one of my works you will realize that I have a tendency to throw up one or two chapters and then forget to update for three months... but the good news is that this one will be pretty short, and I'll probably actually get it done in a timely manner! Cheers to that!


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